Body parts in movies and art

First, big thanks to Michael Seiwerath, the heart and soul of Seattle’s alternative movie scene. Since I had him trapped on the phone yesterday, I asked if he’d name his top 10 movies shot in the Northwest off the top of his head and before the light changed. He’s just a guy who can’t say no, here. The comments that followed were mostly negative. (Sorry, Michael.)

Commenter Arthur Stone challenged the inclusion of Smoke Signals, because, he wrote, he hates movies about hair and teeth. He’s referring to the riff on John Wayne’s teeth (their absence) and couldn’t be more wrong. Sherman Alexie wrote it. Enough said, but I love the comment. Stone is Gracie Allen come back from the dead to comment on culture.

If there were a best contemporary art list for hair and teeth, Ellen Gallagher would make it for hair and Janine Antoni for teeth (all that gnawing on chocolate and lard). Who else? Anslem Kiefer, specifically for Your Golden Hair, Margarete, from 1981, whose text comes from Paul Celan’s Death Fugue, written in a concentration camp in 1945. Celan contrasted golden-haired Margarete, to whom the German guard writes love letters, to Shulamite, a Jewish woman, hair burned to ash.

A thousand doors ago
when I was a lonely kid
in a big house with four
garages and it was summer
as long as I could remember,
I lay on the lawn at night,
clover wrinkling under me,
the wise stars bedding over me,
my mother’s window a funnel
of yellow heat running out,
my father’s window, half shut,
an eye where sleepers pass,
and the boards of the house
were smooth and white as wax
and probably a million leaves
sailed on their strange stalks
as the crickets ticked together
and I, in my brand new body,
which was not a woman’s yet,
told the stars my questions
and thought God could really see
the heat and the painted light,
elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.